Open Letter to Facebook Employees
I am writing not in my capacity as a shareholder, but as a concerned citizen.
You have worked tirelessly to build a world-changing platform that enables almost 1.8 billion people to connect and share what matters to them. What you have accomplished is unprecedented in the history of the world.
The thing is, communications technologies don't just passively reflect what already exists in society. They shape society. From the printing press to the earliest peer-reviewed scientific journals of the Royal Society, from the wireless to radio to television, each new communications technology has evolved with it social institutions that govern how people communicate on that platform. This is not about politics -- Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It is about the rules of debate, whether a communications technology facilitates or destroys a culture where argument is grounded in evidence, reason, and respect.
You are not just building a communications platform. You are building the future.
And right now, the future you are building has a lot of swastikas in it. It's a future where bald-faced lies get more shares than evidence-based argument. It's a future where propaganda trumps reason.
Is that the future you want for your children?
The choice is really yours. No one can stop you from building a communications platform that foregrounds civility, rational evidence-based argument, and tolerance. If you build it, that platform will support a society where the best ideas from the right and from the left, from all races and from all creeds, are shared and discussed and respectfully debated. A society where the best ideas are successful, not the best propaganda. It's up to you.
Move fast. Break things. Before it is too late.